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Colleen Briggs is an artist who shares her work and life with beautiful transparency on her blog Fragments of Light. For example, in her post, Lunge for the Light, she shares that it is “for the days when leaning for the light is not enough,” referencing a previous painting entitled “Lean for the Light” posted two weeks earlier with a short poem of ragged intensity.

I am deeply humbled by Colleen Brigg’s words in this blogpost about prophetic art. God is calling his artists to rise up, to speak, to make His glory known in this earth. Thank you Colleen for demonstrating courage—the courage to explore, experience and encounter God through your artistic work (which is amazing BEaUtiful)!!

“Art is the language of the soul.” With these words, one of my lifelong friends exhorted me as I wrestled for years with an insatiable need to express myself visually. For decades I tried to suppress this language, feeling it could not urgently or adequately address the evils I witnessed in the world. It felt too slow and clumsy to reverse urgent emergencies such as poverty or abandonment. But it was a language that swelled within my being and refused to be silenced. Aristotle said, “A soul never thinks without a picture.” My own soul craved color, texture, pattern and images; and no matter how fast I trotted around the world or how passionately I tried to speak in other ways, it was a soul-whisper that would not be denied.

Like this:

I am in the very beginning stages of writing my next book – about the healing journey of the artist and the artist as healer. This post and artwork touches on how God heals through the artistic process. It’s beautiful!

There was a time in my life when I was stunned into silence. I unexpectedly received news of harm done to someone I love, two days later met the person who caused the harm face-to-face, and then several days after that received medical confirmation for my loved one of resulting lifelong disability.

It was too much, too fast. I shut down. People who cared deeply about me surrounded me, yet knew nothing of what was happening, or only bits and pieces. Grief penetrated like an arrow so deeply buried that even the shaft disappeared into the aching flesh of my heart. I stopped writing, and I stopped verbalizing anything that wasn’t absolutely necessary for some time after.

I understood why sometimes children cope with trauma by refusing to speak. For some things, there are no words. Painting, however, over the…